A welfare state born in India

How William Beveridge's Bakargunje legacy is safe in modern Britain

Suspended between many uncertainties and nervously awaiting a new government in a matter of days, Britain can still be proud of one prized asset — the welfare state that makes it the world’s envy. Not many know, however, that it was born — literally so — in India. 

William, Lord Beveridge, its creator, was the son of Henry Beveridge of the Bengal cadre of the Indian Civil Service, a formidable historian and Persian scholar whose sympathy for Indian nationalists cost him the judgeship he hoped for. His scholarly wife, Annette Akroyd, came to India to further female education and ran a girls’ school in north Calcutta. But she fell out with Keshub Chandra Sen, married Beveridge and became a surprisingly fierce opponent of the Ilbert Bill establishing judicial parity between Indian and European judges.

Thereby hangs another tale of karmic coincidence. When he returned to India in 1871, the Ilbert Bill’s author-to-be, my great-grandfather, Behari Lal Gupta, the second Indian in the ICS, was posted as assistant magistrate and collector under the senior Beveridge in Bakargunje near Dhaka. Beveridge was full of praise for young Gupta, but I mustn’t forget a more recent link with those heroic personalities, the younger Beveridge this time. My old friend Gritta Weil was his secretary in Oxford during World War II (before joining The Observer newspaper where she mentored me) and typed out William Beveridge’s massive  Social Insurance and Allied Services report that is regarded as the blueprint for Clement Attlee’s welfare state. 

People are careful not to mention the question mark that may hang over its future in post-Brexit Britain. Nor does anyone breathe a word about Afro-Asians grabbing the lion’s share of benefits. Yet the unforgettable image of princely abuse from my younger days is of the Sri Lankan financier, Emil Savundra, leaving his lavish house in London’s fashionable St John’s Wood in a fur coat, to be driven in his chauffeur-driven Rolls to the employment exchange where he registered as unemployed. It was a legal necessity for someone who was later convicted of swindling a well-known insurance company out of millions of pounds. 

Great stories did the rounds in those days. One was of a man who collected disability benefits while competing successfully in body-building contests. Another man — someone I came upon as a reporter — maintained his family in comfort on the allowance for an alleged back injury many years earlier. A woman with a pair of delicately trimmed Pekes said, “It’s not worth my while working” as she collected thousands of pounds. No wonder Peter Lilley, the Tory welfare secretary in 1992, adapted the libretto of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical to tell the party conference, “I’ve got a little list/ Of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out/ And who never would be missed.”

Tory paternalism was never sympathetic to welfare. An old tale had the Tories objecting that the working classes would use bath tubs in state housing to store coal. They complained of a Pakistani immigrant claiming allowances for two wives, one in Karachi and the other with him in the English Midlands. Margaret Thatcher cut benefits and closed down shelters, driving thousands of jobless men into the streets where some of them can still be seen, with their squalid bedclothes and begging placards. “Today Labour are voting to increase benefits by more than workers’ wages”, a Tory poster mocked before the 2015 election. The Tories won by promising to cut welfare by £12 billion and balancing the books. “Fairness”, said George Osborne who became David Cameron’s chancellor of the exchequer, is “about being fair to the person who leaves home every morning to go out to work and sees their neighbour still asleep, living a life on benefits”.

But it would be political suicide to try to abolish the welfare state. As Labour party leader, Ed Miliband, promised to crack down on migrants receiving benefits but didn’t survive long enough to prove his courage. When Osborne did introduce cuts, Labour MPs chose to abstain rather than oppose them. However, a bunch of left-wing backbenchers ignored the whip and voted against the cuts. One of them, John McDonnell, declared dramatically he would “swim through vomit” to vote against the cuts; another, Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader could in theory succeed Theresa May as prime minister.

With the British Social Attitudes Survey predicting that concern over growing poverty, no doubt fuelled by anxiety over Brexit, is rising, the controversial Corbyn can even claim to have acted astutely. He can cite the finding that 56 per cent of the people think that cutting benefits “would damage too many people’s lives”. William Beveridge’s Bakargunje legacy is safe in modern Britain.